JFK trip was a turning point in Ireland

THE four-day visit to Ireland by US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Jun 1963 is seen as a turning point in the country’s modern history, writes Ray Ryan

Many people regard it as the key event that marked Old Ireland finally giving way to New Ireland in a rapidly changing world.

The website of the committee which has organised a JFK50 celebration in Kennedy’s ancestral town of New Ross in Co Wexford, notes the significance of the visit: “He came to a country that was changing. Ireland, so long isolated, was at last ready to take her place among the nations of the earth.”

The ceremonies in New Ross on Saturday will be attended by Taoiseach Enda Kenny and members of Kennedy’s family, including his daughter Caroline and sister Jean Kennedy Smith, the former US ambassador to Ireland.

It will also be an occasion to reflect on the legacy of Kennedy’s visit and provide an outlet for people who lived through it all to recall memories of the smiling president as he travelled around the country.

Time magazine, which put the then taoiseach Seán Lemass on its cover shortly after the visit, noted in an article headlined “Lifting the Green Curtain”, that while the Irish clung to their past, there were signs that the nation was also at last facing up to its future.

It observed that for the first time in the century, most Irishmen were ready to believe that their future could be a bright one.

The magazine noted that the signs were everywhere: In the new factories and office buildings, in the Irish-assembled cars fighting for street space in Dublin, in the new TV antennas crowding the rooftops, and in the waning of national self-pity.

Kennedy’s own family story, from emigrant ship to the White House in three generations, was a source of great pride in Ireland. The people felt he was one of their own, returning to the land of his ancestors. There was a national outpouring of joy.

Framed photographs of him were displayed over the fireplace in many kitchens, often set between pictures of two popes, John XXIII, who died just before his visit, and Paul XI, whose coronation took place at the Vatican on the day after his departure.

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